4 ms·

I don't think the average undergraduate has any idea of what is involved in postgraduate work or what working in academia actually involves.

• abhinav22 6y ago
  They need to though. I wish it wasn’t the case, but largely it is in my opinion.
  • arethuza 6y ago
    Do any career options give recent graduates a realistic idea of what is involved in working in that field? I'm not sure that academia is any worse than a lot of other fields and it does, potentially, have a lot of advantages. [e.g. I co-founded a startup with someone I met in academia]
    • abhinav22 6y ago
      In a crude sense, more career options swing the relationship in favor of the employees vs employers, so it can be used as a guideline for whether a career will be rewarding and fairly compensated. I would argue people in academics are on average harder workers than other fields, so overall they have it a bit tougher given all the work they put in. There are successes in every field, I am just making some vast generalizations for our discussion :-)
• specialist 6y ago
  Further, the incentives are misaligned. I wonder if we (USA) restored government funding for higher ed, would college programs be more honest about graduation rates and job placements.
  • arethuza 6y ago
    When I was working in academia as a researcher it was all EU or UK Government funding and those incentives were just as misaligned.